Official Windows Phone Jailbreak Stalls

Windows Phone users looking to jailbreak their devices may have missed their chance to do so through Microsoft's officially-sanctioned method.

ChevronWP7 Labs, a $9 tool that lets users install homebrew apps from outside the Windows Phone Marketplace, is no longer available for purchase. Users who bought the unlock tool were given a "token" to redeem on their phone of choice, but apparently the ChevronWP7 team had arranged to sell only a limited number of tokens.

"Our agreement with Microsoft was to sell no more than 10,000 tokens, hence 'sold out,'" developer Rafael Rivera wrote on Twitter. "We're discussing if we want to up that number."

Rivera told The Verge that those discussions are internal for now, and that the ChevronWP7 team hasn't talked to Microsoft about it yet. On Twitter, he noted that the jailbreak program is "a pain in the ass to support," so the decision may have more to do with the ChevronWP7 team than with Microsoft.

Therein lies the dilemma: An official jailbreak allows Microsoft to keep a closer watch on homebrew development -- say, to make sure there's no piracy going on -- but it also carries the burden of support for paying customers. That job apparently fell to the ChevronWP7 team, and the more tokens they sell, the more time they have to spend troubleshooting.

It's unclear when more tokens will become available, if ever. For now, unofficial Windows Phone jailbreaks are available through DFT Freedom ROM for HTC phones and the WindowBreak Project for Samsung phones.